Manager, Business Systems Analyst

Description

The company is a global provider of clinical research services, commercial insights and healthcare intelligence to the life sciences and healthcare industries.

This role leads a team of Business Analysts in the Central Automation Center of Excellence, delivering automation and AI work across several business units and regions.

You will manage the portfolio, lead people, own process and methodology, and oversee delivery, running ADLC (AI/Automation Development Life Cycle) in a Lean way with measurable ROI, FTE savings and audit-ready documentation.

The team also gives functional leadership on AI and agentic automation: use-case discovery, feasibility, responsible AI, human-in-the-loop controls and value tracking.

The ideal candidate has managed BA teams delivering automation and AI in an enterprise CoE, and is skilled in governance cadences, benefits tracking and compliance in regulated environments.

Responsibilities

• Manage the BA portfolio across business units and regions, with intake through VIA/ServiceNow, the pipeline in Smartsheet, and Process IDs linked across Smartsheet, JIRA and PSA.
• Work with the PMO on priorities, capacity and benefits tracking, including ROI, FTE savings and cycle-time KPIs.
• Run weekly or biweekly pipeline and delivery reviews, monthly BU governance and quarterly sponsor reviews.
• Keep each BA at roughly 10-12 projects, and resolve cross-team dependencies and bottlenecks.
• Lead and coach BAs and Sr. BAs on goals, performance, feedback and career growth; allocate resources and support hiring, onboarding and stretch assignments.
• Build team skills in Lean, ADLC, Power Automate, Alteryx, Python/SQL and GenAI or agentic tools (Copilot, Cursor, LangGraph), covering prompt engineering, RAG, agent orchestration, AI-assisted requirements and responsible AI.
• Encourage a team culture of client focus, collaboration, ownership and innovation.
• Maintain BA standards, templates and repositories (BRD, PDD, TFD, SDD in SharePoint and Confluence), along with the RACI, a single approval flow, prioritization criteria and traceability.
• Apply ADLC from intake through L0/L1/L2 discovery, technical discovery, business case, build, UAT and rollout; run retrospectives and keep team playbooks current.
• Define AI-specific BA standards covering problem framing, use-case suitability, prompt and knowledge-source needs, evaluation criteria, human oversight, explainability, output validation and post-deployment monitoring.
• Check discovery quality and gate readiness, and lead Go/No-Go decisions against clear acceptance criteria.
• Oversee RAID, change control (changes over 16 hours are Major and under 16 hours are Minor, handled via VIA/ServiceNow) and compliance requirements.
• Align environments, access, data security and governance with Architects and the PMO.
• Make sure user stories, non-functional requirements and traceability matrices are complete and testable.
• For AI solutions, confirm requirements cover data and knowledge quality, hallucination and accuracy risk, prompt security, access controls, human review, evaluation metrics and responsible AI governance.
• Build business cases (effort, FTE, ROI, payback period) with PMO and Finance inputs through PSA.
• Produce current and future-state process maps and L0/L1/L2 assessments, and test automation feasibility and value.
• Support tool selection (RPA/Power Automate, Alteryx, Python/SQL, OCR, GenAI) and assess API and GUI integrations.
• Turn business needs into AI-ready requirements: user journeys, prompt workflows, knowledge and data needs, grounding/RAG, agent roles, orchestration, exception handling, human approval points and measurable evaluation criteria.
• Judge whether deterministic automation, predictive AI, generative AI or agentic AI fits, based on process complexity, data availability, risk, scalability and expected value.
• Keep traceability from BRD/PDD through test coverage to production KPIs.
• Build relationships with BU leaders, SMEs, Architects and development teams across global time zones.
• Run workshops, executive readouts and governance forums, managing expectations and escalations.
• Standardize portfolio and delivery reporting in Power BI and promote CoE ways of working.
• Track benefits realization and coordinate smooth handovers to operations.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Business, Information Systems, Engineering or a related field.
• 6-8+ years in business or systems analysis, automation or digital transformation.
• 3+ years leading BAs or cross-functional delivery teams.
• Proven end-to-end ADLC delivery from intake through L0/L1/L2, BRD/PDD, UAT and rollout.
• Portfolio oversight with the PMO covering prioritization, capacity, governance and value realization.
• Delivery basics in Agile or hybrid settings: planning, RAID and change control.
• Lean-trained BA with BPMN or Visio process modeling, benefits modeling and data-driven decision making.
• Working knowledge of VIA/ServiceNow, Smartsheet, JIRA, PSA, SharePoint and Power BI.
• Technical fluency in Power Automate or RPA, Alteryx, Python, SQL, OCR and GenAI or agentic tools.
• Practical AI BA skills: GenAI use-case discovery, prompt engineering, RAG and knowledge grounding, AI agent workflows, human-in-the-loop design, AI output evaluation and responsible AI.
• Strengths in client focus, stakeholder partnership, cross-functional influence, clear written and verbal communication, innovation, ownership, business and strategic thinking, people coaching, adaptability and planning, AI use-case discovery and value assessment, prompt engineering and AI requirements, and responsible AI and governance.
• Preferred: experience in automation teams, Shared Services, Operational Excellence or consulting, including multi-region delivery.
• Preferred: finance, life sciences or healthcare industry exposure.
• Preferred: Automation Anywhere, SAP, PSFT, Azure or Databricks, and enterprise API or GUI integration experience.
• Preferred: ITIL, data security and governance awareness.
• Preferred: proven executive stakeholder management and executive-ready communication.
• Preferred: experience defining business and functional requirements for GenAI or agentic AI on platforms such as Microsoft Copilot, Azure AI, Cursor, LangGraph or equivalent.
• Preferred: understanding of AI risks and controls, including hallucination, bias, data privacy, prompt injection, secure grounding, explainability, human oversight and performance monitoring.
• Certification: Lean Six Sigma Green Belt or higher (Strongly Preferred).
• Certification: CBAP or PMI-PBA (Preferred).
• Certification: PMP or PRINCE2 Practitioner (Preferred).
• Certification: Agile certification such as Scrum Product Owner and/or Scrum Master (Preferred).
• Certification: ITIL Foundation (Plus).
• Certification: Microsoft Power Platform PL-900 and/or PL-200 (Plus).
• Certification: Alteryx Designer Core or Automation Anywhere certification (Plus).
• Certification: Microsoft Copilot, Power Platform AI Builder or equivalent GenAI or agentic AI certification (Plus).

Conditions

The company promotes equal opportunity and is committed to equality between women and men in its employment policies.